Paris Grand Prix: Caruana and Gelfand Lead Going Into The Last Round
There is one round to go at the Grand Prix tournament in Paris, and the double race is heading for a thrilling finish. Fabiano Caruana and Boris Gelfand are tied for first with one round to go in the tournament, and unless Caruana can finish ahead of Gelfand it will be Shakhriyar Mamedyarov who wins qualification from the overall Grand Prix series to the next Candidates' tournament.
Today, round 10 showed both Caruana and Gelfand rising to the occasion. Caruana did what he needed, defeating Evgeny Tomashevsky with the white pieces to keep his hopes alive. Meanwhile, Gelfand had the more challenging task, facing Hikaru Nakamura, then the tournament leader, with Black. Nakamura made the practical mistake of going head-to-head with Gelfand in the Najdorf. Gelfand won a fantastic game, and now he and Caruana have 6.5 points apiece heading into the last round. Nakamura has 6, as does Etienne Bacrot, who obliterated Laurent Fressinet on the black side of a Bayonet King's Indian.
About this last game: if someone can explain it to me that would be wonderful. (Insomnia? Illness?) In an extremely well-known theoretical line, Fressinet suddenly stopped to think for more than 40 minutes and played the near-novelty 15.exf5. (It was played once before in a non-correspondence game featuring a 2000 vs. a 1900.) This is by no means a typical capture in the variation, and to all appearances it gives Black what he wants. It's hard to know what Fressinet had in mind or what he may have overlooked, but five moves later he was a pawn down without much compensation. His 22nd and 23rd moves were both blunders, and he resigned after Black's 24th move. He was down two pawns with a horrible position and further material losses to come. Anyone can blunder, but this game was just odd from move 15 on.
Key Last Round Pairings:
- Gelfand (6.5) - Ponomariov
- Dominguez - Caruana (6.5)
- Giri - Nakamura (6)
- Bacrot (6) - Grischuk
Reader Comments (3)
Well I guess you're hinting at whether there may have been some kind of accommodation between the two Frenchmen. At most, there may have been an inclination of Fressinet to play riskily in my view given he didn't have much to gain? I can't believe there is more to it...
[DM: No, I am absolutely NOT doing that! To note that the game was extremely weird is not to say that something shifty was going on. Some games that are weird may be fixed, but a game can be fixed without overt weirdness and a game can be weird without being fixed.
There's no testimonial evidence that the game was thrown, there's no real motive (Bacrot probably won't win first place and he's not in the running for the Candidates), there's no history that I'm aware of that either man has ever been accused of fixing games. So there's no reason for me or anyone else to think that the game was anything other than a class A implosion from Fressinet. That I asked for an explanation wasn't an accusation of a fix. (In fact, to help avoid this kind of interpretation I threw a couple of innocuous possibilities in a parenthetical.) I do not want to take liberties with people's reputations.]
In the post-game interview he mentioned he wanted to surprise Bacrot but was unfamiliar with this type of position.
I didn't find Fressinet's play that odd. It seems he must have overlooked something when deciding on 15.exf5, with 16.Bb2 presumably part of the same idea. Nothing odd happens for the next few moves, but by move 20 he looks busted. Black has more or less everything he could ask for from a King's Indian, and an extra pawn. Maybe Fressinet is by then just disgusted with the position; we saw Ivanchuk resign for a similar reason earlier, and I seem to recall Anand having done the same thing, so this is an understandable reaction. But then 22.c5 just looks like a bit of a desperado move, and 23.Qc2 hardly matters at all. So rather than see it as a "class A implosion", isn't it more charitable to think that Fressinet just missed something when playing 15.exf5, has given up by move 20, then plays a couple of random moves before resigning?
[DM: Well, all I can recommend is that you look at a bunch of Bayonet games where White doesn't play 15.exf5, which is all but two of several hundred. Sometimes White gives up/loses a pawn on e6, but gets plenty of compensation for it. In the game that doesn't even start to happen, but White is not lost or really even that close to lost until his 22nd and 23rd moves. Struggling for compensation, yes, but not stone-cold busted.]